The downside for cyber criminals is that the sheer volume of possible combinations means rainbow tables can be enormous, often hundreds of gigabytes in size. Much of the computation is done before the attack takes place, making it far easier and quicker to launch an attack, compared to other methods. Hackers are then able to compare these listings with any encrypted passwords they discover in a company’s system. Rainbow tables go one step further, as rather than simply providing a password and its hash, these store a precompiled list of all possible plaintext versions of encrypted passwords based on a hash algorithm. In order to bypass this, hackers maintain and share directories that record passwords and their corresponding hashes, often built from previous hacks, reducing the time it takes to break into a system (used in brute force attacks). Whenever a password is stored on a system, it’s typically encrypted using a ‘hash’, or a cryptographic alias, making it impossible to determine the original password without the corresponding hash.
The goal here is to drastically reduce the time it takes to crack a password, and remove any unnecessary processing. This could see attackers simply trying to use commonly used passwords like ‘password123’ against a known username, for example. Brute force attackīrute force attacks involve hackers using a variety of methods, usually on a trial-and-error basis, to guess their way into a user’s account. Some malware will even proactively hunt through a user’s system for password dictionaries or data associated with web browsers. Keyloggers, and their ilk, record a user’s activity, whether that’s through keystrokes or screenshots, which is all then shared with a hacker. Alongside highly disruptive malicious software like ransomware, which attempts to block access to an entire system, there are also highly specialised malware families that target passwords specifically. Keyloggers, screen scrapers, and a host of other malicious tools all fall under the umbrella of malware, malicious software designed to steal personal data. Successful social engineering attacks can be incredibly convincing and highly lucrative, as was the case when the CEO of a UK-based energy company lost £201,000 to hackers after they tricked him with an AI tool that mimicked his assistant’s voice.
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